The Ed Techie

Web 2.0 course designs

I did a presentation yesterday to a group at the OU looking at new models of course design (the feeling is that what can be termed OU Classic is not a flexible enough model to meet all of our needs). I suggested 5 models:

1. The self-updating course - the course designer creates general activities, for example 'Analyse three of the resources below using X's theory...' The resources come from RSS feeds, user tagged content, etc. So the actual resources are unknown at the time of writing, but if the feeds are reliable they will be current when the student studies.
2. The content-lite course - content produced by the course designer that is. This is essentially a resource based approach, so students or groups might have a general task, e.g. complete a business proposal for a web 2.0 product' and then have a range of resources such as user generated content (the proposals from previous years), blog feeds, podcasts, etc. Again some of this content will be unknown, but some will be selected by the educator.
3. The personalised course - this is more of a competency based approach, so the student has to show their competence or understanding of X, and gathers together the resources they feel they need.
4. All marketing is content - in this one I suggested that the OU doesn't do marketing anymore and instead simply creates content, which is made freely available through the OpenLearn space. Anyone can take and use this content (thus fulfilling the outreach function) and the OU also draws upon this as the central resource pool for creating its own courses.
5. Course as aggregation - really another take on number 4. Here the focus is not on creating content for a specific course, but rather on creating content in subject areas, which is stored in a central content management system. When we wish to create a specific course we take and adapt content from here, and combine it with some specifically created material. This makes the course production process much more flexible.

There are probably more, and what these models hide is a wealth of complexity in terms of academic practice, institutional process and also an individual's sense of identity. But I think there are merits to all of them.

Here is the presentation via Slideshare:

Stringle implications

The last in this trilogy of posts...

Several things occurred to me when playing with Stringle yesterday. I'll try to elucidate them here:

Course design - increasingly I feel that writing course resources is a redundant activity. I think course design will move towards creating activities around as yet unknown content. For instance, we added in a feed for any content that is tagged elearning and evolution. Now it's a reasonable bet that this will contain some decent (and not so decent material). But it helps future-proof the course. I don't think you could quite rely on such resources but the ratio of educator derived material to external resources is surely going to decrease.

Why does HE develop tools - I know, I've commented on this before, but looking at the range of tools that are just out there, and the ease with which you can pull them in to a system made me wonder it all over again. I would like to propose Weller's rule of educational software development which goes something like 'if an educational establishment wants to develop a tool then by the time it has reached the functional requirements stage a better one will be freely available'. Allright, it's not a snappy one, but you get the idea.

PLEs are possible - I've been a bit of a critic of PLEs, partly because they seemed obsessed with clients and partly because they underestimated some of the challenges I felt. But I can see how a mid-ground between the 'it's all down to the user' and 'central control' models could be found, by providing default tools, and allowing users to pull in their preferred ones if they wish.

Openness is the new king - if the struggle to get Vista shipped hadn't convinced me that the proprietary model of software development was dead, then this has. I kept thinking of the time I had spent getting a course ready for the UK e-university, who spent somewhere between 10 and 18 million pounds on developing a VLE. It wasn't very good. Imagine what you could do with something like a Stringle approach for a tenth (even a hundredth) of that money.

Anyway that's enough on Stringle.

10 things to unlearn

A nice piece from Will Richardson on 10 Things educators need to unlearn. There's a bit of rhetoric about it, and sure it hides a wealth of complications, but if I worked in a strategy unit of a university or major corporation, I'd be asking myself 'what would education look like if we tried to address these 10 issues?' If we take just one of these e.g. "We need to unlearn the practice that teaches all students at the same pace. Is it any wonder why so many of our students love to play online games where they move forward at their own pace?" then that would have significant implications for how we structure education - it might lead to more e-learning for one, with user determined pacing, subscription models of content, changes in assessment practice, changes in the academic year (a semester doesn't make much sense in a self-paced world), as well as possible negatives such as difficulties in establishing groupwork, loss of identity with the immediate cohort (although a wider one could be established), etc.

I think it is the wider ramifications of these changes that makes educational practice so resistant to change. I was discussing personalisation with someone the other day, and when we began to unpick it there were drastic changes required to how academics operate, what students do, how universities are funded, and so on. Within 10 minutes we felt the need to create a whole new educational structure, and that's a bit much, so rather like naughty children who had unwrapped a Christmas present early, we packaged it back up as best we could and thought 'best leave it alone.'

So while you might agree with a lot of Will's 10 items (and I do), the tricky part is then translating them in to small, practical steps. This delivering is often undervalued in higher education (I know, I've made a career out of almost delivering). Steve Jobs, back when he was leading the Mac development team and before he became a professional messiah, used to have a mantra 'real artists ship.' Perhaps we should adopt that in education: 'Real educators deliver' (this would then be followed by a 100 page treatise on what constituted 'real', 'educators' and 'deliver').

What does HE provide exactly?

A few people (e.g. weblogg-ed) have blogged about the following demo of Zoho Notebook (which isn't released yet)

It does look very good and one can immediately see all sorts of possibilities for it in education, with students sharing and collaborating on content.

What it made me think was, as I posted a few days ago, increasingly I wonder why we bother to develop technologies in higher education. None of the stuff we develop is ever as agile, cool, usable or useful as this wealth of free commercial software out there now. Imagine you were employed to find the technology that would have the most significant impact on education in the next 5 to 10 years. Would you seriously look at what universities were doing to find the answer?

Partly this is cultural - the values that higher education holds dear are things like rigour, transparency and thoroughness. These are reflected in the software approaches it adopts with very sound stakeholder consultation, deeply studious problem analysis, measured and precise software specification, user testing, etc. By which time the product is irrelevant.

The pace of change is worrying too, my colleague Tony Hirst (who pointed me at this video) says he finds something every weekend that he thinks he could use in a course, and I don't doubt him. So even as it stands I want to say to developers 'can we just freeze everything for two years so we can catch up and start using this stuff?'

But the problem for higher education is even worse when you consider the wealth of content out there. Perhaps this is the sort of admission a professor shouldn't make, but I read more (and get more from) blogs now than I do from learned journals. And I would advise students to do the same. Add in podcasts, YouTube, Slideshare, open educational resources and the idea that the university or educator is the provider of the content looks decidedly shakey.

In essence we are all autodidacts now, but rather than being the oddball dilettante of Sartre's Nausea, autodidacts are now able to take any subject to a fine level of detail while maintaining a social life. Even worse, we are all autotechsupport now as well.

So, with the net providing the content and the technology I am reminded of the quote in Schindlers List when Itzhak Stern says to Schindler "Let me understand. They put up all the money. I do all the work. What, if you don't mind my asking, would you do?" I think increasingly this is a question that students will ask of HE, but more importantly which it should ask of itself.

web 2.0 workshop

I ran a workshop for the e-learning community at the OU today. It went quite well, I had two activities, one of which got people to consider their current practice and how they might add some 2.0 to it, and another which got them to look at some web 2.0 applications and think about how they might be used in a course.

Anyway, the powerpoint is on slideshare, and embedded below. If you've looked at any of my other web 2.0 presentations, you'll see that it's not dissimiliar. I used to feel bad about this, but actually each one changes slightly, so the presentation evolves over time. Having been schooled in learning objects, open source software and web 2.0 over the past few years, endless reuse has lost its shame for me - I now embrace it.

Outsourcing learning technologies

This article in the Economist Consumer technologies are invading corporate computing (via George Siemens) outlines how some universities are effectively outsourcing a lot of technical development, using the Google Apps for your domain bundle. The guy says that "Compared with the staid corporate-software industry, using these services is like “receiving technology from an advanced civilisation”, says Mr Sannier."

A couple of things on this - firstly there is often a delay between the rhetoric and the reality when new ideas come along. The whole service oriented approach was one of these. I found myself wisely telling everyone to think of everything as a service, without really being sure what this meant. Google have continued to demonstrate what this really means, and this is a good example. It's not about buying a big bit of kit for your IT guys to install, you simply say 'all our students get the Google services.' Secondly, it really does mark something of a watershed that universities are now formally recognising these consumer, real world apps and not insisting that somehow education is special and needs to develop its own tools. Thirdly, what sort of impact does this have on institutional practice? As a small example, at the OU we have struggled with a calendar project for a while (partly it isn't a calendar project but a multiple database problem), but at what point would it be effective to say 'hey, go with Google'. What the institution needs to concentrate on then is making data available in the right format. It's kind of analagous to educators needing to shift their focus from creating content to supporting understanding.

The pointlessness of plagiarism detection

Today I was invited to sit on an e-cheating panel at the Web Based Education 2007 conference in Chamonix. Unfortunately I can't make it, but it prompted me to consider the whole plagiarism issue. This was something I had to wrestle with a good deal when I chaired T171 You, your computer and the Net back in 1999. We had 12,000 students, so trying to find a plagiarism proof assessment method was a priority. This was back in the early days of e-learning and there were lots of people waiting to see it fail. Rather like distance education in its early days, e-learning suffered from a legitimacy deficit, so it had to work extra hard to prove its credentials.

It was all a bit Lewis and Clark at the time so we took a joing approach of designing assessment that was less plagiarisable and also putting in place human detection systems (the plagiarism detection tools were just starting then). The latter was surprisingly effective - usually the writing style changes dramatically (I would just avoid saying 'improves') and putting a suspect phrase in to Google was usually sufficient to uncover the source.

The plagiarism detection and provision services have since entered in to the kind of arms race we see with viruses and anti-virus software (indeed one could see plagiarism as an assessment virus). It isn't really a field I have kept up with to a great extent, particularly as I now chair a postgrad course where the numbers are much lower, the assessment more varied and the likelihood of cheating much lower.

My feeling though is that plagiarism is a symptom of old-fashioned assessment techniques, and to put effort in to plagiarism detection is to miss the point. What a plagiarism susceptible system reveals is an unhealthy emphasis on content and an old-fashioned worldview. If you assume that all content is freely available (not necessarily true, but let's go with it as a starting point), then if you ask students to create content then of course they're going to lift bits from various sources, whether intentionally or unintentionally. There is an argument that the assessment method is going contrary to the connectedness of the modern world here, although acknowledging others is always good practice. But my point is that if we took this as a base assumption we would devise different assessment methods. There is nothing about the conventional exam or essay that is an absolute measure of academic quality - in fact you can view these as administrative conveniences based on the face to face, physical constraints of education. Finding ways of perpetuating them by 'catching' plagiarism to me just demonstrates a lack of imagination.

I patent it

Scott Wilson points to another ludicrous patent - this time someone's trying to do a landgrab on community based learning. The fact that it is laughable is what's so worrying - being blatantly stupid is no guarantee against something being accepted. I want to get these potential patents in now, so if anyone does try and patent them I can claim prior exposure:

Gaming - any computer based system where the user manipulates a virtual character through a simulated world, according to rules determined by the system. The world is divided into different stages of levels which the user must demonstrate increased proficiency to gain access to. The user gains entertainment through the completion of the game.

Help systems - any computer based system that offers advice, tips or help to a user engaging with a piece of software or a computer based activity. The system is based around a knowledge base of queries and can offer just in time advice.

E-learning - any system that provides content and tools that facilitate a cognitive change in the user and promote learning.

Oh, that last one has been done already. These may seem ludicrous but software patents don't operate much beyond this level, and if they get to this stage we may as well forget any form of innovation. This is why I disagree with some of the open source response to the BB patent which is that it doesn't matter, because monolithic VLEs are crap anyway. That may, or may not, be true (in my succession model I argue that the monolithic VLEs have played an important colonization role), but even if it is, that isn't the point - if this patent succeeds then you can bet that someone will patent something you do care about, just because securing a software patent becomes part of the normal process.

If there wasn't big money involved then this practice would be reminiscent of playground behaviour. We used to use the term 'bagsy' to lay claim to something - s in "I bagsy I go in goal first" or "I bagsy the chair by the window." This was remarkably robust at settling disputes "No, I bagsied it." I can imagine educational software companies sitting around a table "I bagsy e-learning!" "Damn! Well then I bagsy resource based learning".

It may work in the playground but it's no way to run an industry.

I'm an academic, disintermediate me now

In the past week I have used the word 'disintermediation' twice, almost without embarrassment. It may be an ugly term but it is an important concept. Admittedly these two occurrences were in academic conversations, I didn't use it down the pub or anything, but they were in different contexts which demonstrates that it is one of those ideas that has some currency.

(If you're not sure what it means - it is the removal of intermediaries and it's often the result of technology e.g. the word processor disintermediated typing pools).

In education terms the easy to use VLE has (to an extent) disintermediated a lot instructional designers - the educator can create their course, upload content, arrange forums and synchronous sessions without going cap in hand to their IT unit (or in theory they can anyway, lots of institutions put intermediaries back in place through policy - yes, it is called reintermediation).

It is one of the standard claims of the anti-elearning fundamentalists (Noble and the like) that elearning disintermediates academics since content is freely available. The response to this has always been obvious, bordering on the incredulous - you mean to say that the only thing you offer as an academic is content? There should be an awful lot more to education than that. The claim itself seems to reveal something fundamentally flawed in their view of the learning process.

But as I mentioned before the provision of content, tools and really informed discussion - ie all the ingredients for a good quality learning experience - on the wider internet does threaten the monopoly of universities. Previously my response to this has been similar to the one above 'ah yes, but universities do more than this.' This is an appeasement - it roughly translates as 'don't worry academics, there's nothing to see here, move on please'.

But perhaps this is the wrong response - maybe we should be saying 'you know what - universities will be disintermediated by the internet. Let's accept that and see what happens'. After all newspapers, broadcasting and retail have all been massively changed over recent years by the internet. In general this has been a good thing for the individual costumer (as I appreciated when I did all my Christmas shopping from my dining room while watching the Ashes). But, except in the numbers and demographics of students, higher education hasn't really changed in the past forty years. An academic from 1966 would fit quite comfortably in to the practises of a modern university. They might begrudge the extra admin, the additional teaching load, the apolitical students, but they'd still be happy giving a lecture (perhaps using the same notes). The same would not be true for a TV broadcaster from 1966.

I don't know what a disintermediated educational sector would be like, but I feel that we shouldn't pretend it can't happen, and maintaining the comfort of academics (such as myself) is not reason enough to prevent it.

Heisenberg, FLOSS and education transfer

Another thing I have been pondering as a result of the Thessaloniki meeting of the FLOSScom project is the extent to which the informal learning that takes place in FLOSS communities is mutually exclusive with the demands of formal education. The assumption is that a good deal of learning takes place in FLOSS communities, and often it is the type of situated, social type learning many of us in higher education would love to develop in our practise.

Let us take a small example - one of the partners talked about a course where they had exposed computer students to FLOSS projects. They talked about some of the difficulties of mapping activity in the open source project on to formal assessment procedures within the university. They have toyed with the idea of using some of the metrics which can be seen as proxies or informal indicators within the FLOSS community for an individual's worth or contribution. They gave number of views (in say sourceforge) as an example - one could think of many others, e.g. frequency of posting in a forum, number of times a piece of code is reused, number of accepted contributions to the source code, etc. But the problem is that as soon as you make these the formal criteria by which people are assessed then it influences behaviour. In the case of using something like number of views it might mean students simply keep hitting refresh, whereas with more robust indicators such as accepted bug fixes, what it might do is skew the whole community to fixing bugs (maybe even deliberately introducing bugs so they can be fixed) and away from many of the other tasks that are not formally accredited, e.g. coordination.

I remember watching a football programme once and Jimmy Hill (a well known football pundit in the UK) was discussing how penalties were no way to decide a game. He suggested going on the number of corners accrued in a game. This would benefit the attacking team he proposed and if a cup game was all square at the end the team who had won the most corners would be declared the winner. I was amazed that even as a child I could see the flaw in this argument and this (ahem) expert could not. As soon as you made corners the deciding factor then teams would play to win corners. This would lead to an even duller game than when a team plays for penalties It would give rise to the bizarre scenario of a team nearing the end of the game booting the ball upfield, whacking it against an opponent (making no attempt to score a goal of course) and then running wildly up the pitch celebrating because they have won a corner.

My point is, that like Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, you cannot measure one thing without influencing another. And formal education is obsessed with measuring, scoring and testing so I feel that any attempt to bring informal learning methods into higher education will end up destroying what it was in those methods that made them worthwhile in the first place. Unless that is, higher education itself is changed by the process...